Zillow is one of the most popular websites used by real estate professionals in the USA, getting over 200 million visits each month. To get the best out of this website, you require a tool called Zillow Scraper API. Today, we’ll show you how to use it for finding valuable data about real estate listings.
Utilizing Scraping Property Listings for Smart Real Estate Decisions
Is scraping property listings a good idea? Yes! Here’s why: Scraping property listings can help you get lots of data all at once.
Automated web scraping tools can do an awesome job for you! They help you collect lots of data from many sources without having to do boring and repetitive work. Plus, it would be really hard to get a large amount of data by hand. Real estate agents need big amounts of information if they want to make smart decisions.
To get an overall better understanding of the real estate market, it is important to collect data from many different sources like listings sites, property portals, and agent or broker websites. This way you can spot any new opportunities that the market may have.
Gathering data about real estate can help you spot good opportunities and make better decisions. An investor, for example, can use this data to find properties that have been priced too low or too high – so they can make more money.
Also, the collected information can help you see how much similar properties are worth. This way you’ll know what price and marketing strategy to apply with your own listings.
Overcoming Challenges of Real Estate Web Scraping
Scraping real estate websites can be complicated and you might face some difficulties during the process. For example, some property websites use complex and fancy layouts that make it hard for web scrapers to grab all the needed information correctly. As a result, the data could be wrong or missing something and then you’ll need to fix it manually.
– Anti-scraping measures
Sometimes websites use stuff like JavaScript, AJAX and CAPTCHA to stop you from collecting data or even block your IP address. To get around this, you will need some extra techniques.
– Data quality
Property prices change often so the data you get might be outdated which means it won’t match what’s happening in the real estate market right now.
It’s hard to know whether or not web scraping is allowed when it comes to real estate websites. Generally, you should only scrape data that isn’t copyrighted. To be sure, talk to a lawyer about your specific situation. That way, you won’t break any rules!
Get Zillow Data Using Python–Or Try Another Language!
We are going to use Python programming language to get Zillow data. However, If you want, you can use a different language too.
Installing Python and Getting Ready to Scrape Real Estate Data with Requests and bs4
First, we need to install the newest version of Python. Then, using its package manager, pip, we will install two more things called ‘requests’ and ‘bs4’. We are going to use these two packages with a program named Real Estate Scraper API to extract information from HTML files.
Unlocking Real Estate Data
For writing code, there are two main parameters that you need to know about. The Proxywatcher’s Real Estate Scraper API needs only two – source and url. Source should be set to ‘universal’ if you want scraping Zillow data and the url should be a link to any Zillow page. There are additional optional parameters like user_agent_type which sets the type of browser and device, and geo_location which allows getting data from a particular area.
locale – tells us what language the web page should be in;
render – lets us see stuff written in JavaScript.
Scraping Zillow For Data
In order to get data from Zillow, we need to begin by getting some special tools. We have to type in the search query, and get a URL – like this one: https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/_rb/. To make our request, we will use something called a “payload” and then input it using the ‘requests’ module. Once everything is set up, we can store our result in what is called a response variable.
When you send this request, make sure to enter your own Proxywatcher username and password. We’ll also be sending the message in a type of data called json. Afterwards, look at the response code to see if it worked. You should get a ‘200’ status code – if you don’t, double-check your Internet connection and that you entered the right URL and credentials correctly.
To use the information from the Zillow website, we need to get the HTML first, which is a piece of data that a computer looks at. We use something called Beautiful Soup Library to grab and parse it – sounds like normal cooking right? After grabbing this HTML, we can “parse” it by looking through the content just like any other normal web page.
We have a loop going through all the search results, picking out the address and price from each property page we look at. To do this, we take a look at the HTML code to find certain tags that tell us what we need to know. With this same technique, we can also grab other information about the properties too.
To scrape individual listings from websites like Zillow, we need to find the HTML tags and attributes for the desired elements. We can do this by inspecting using a web browser and then using a tool called Beautiful Soup to parse the listing page with the information we found. For example, we’ll use this link https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/3789-Conley-Downs-Ln-Decatur-GA-30034/14427531_zpid/ to show how it’s done.
“Quick and Easy Access to Real Estate Agent Data in Decatur, GA
We can use something called an “API” to get data about real estate agents. To do this, we just have to change a few things in a thing we already created called a “scraper”.
For example, let’s say we go to this website: https://www.zillow.com/professionals/real-estate-agent-reviews/decatur-ga/. We can use the scraper to get information from this website about real estate agents who work in Decatur GA area.
If you run this code, it’ll tell you a list of real estate agents. Be aware though, because Zillow changes the layout of their website often and sometimes those changes might affect the way this code works. If that happens, you should just need to change some names or attributes – it’s pretty straightforward.
Unlock Zillow Data with Easy-To-Use Scraper Tools From Proxywatcher!
Scraping data from Zillow can be tricky because it updates so often. Thankfully, Proxywatcher has made a special scraper tool to help you out if you get stuck. If anything is still confusing, just contact our team over email or on our website’s live chat service. Our specialists will be happy to answer any questions about scraping Zillow data!
